ON JUNE 1st last year, General Motors, the world's largest car company until 2008 (when Toyota overtook it), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with liabilities that were twice its assets. A month earlier Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit's so-called Big Three carmakers, had also gone belly-up. Ford, which had mortgaged itself to the hilt three years earlier, only narrowly escaped the same fate.

The double-whammy of petrol at $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008 rapidly followed by the freezing of the credit markets after the Lehman Brothers bust had finally brought America's native car industry to its knees. Yet only a decade earlier, GM, Ford and Chrysler were minting money, churning out the highly profitable pickups and SUVs that Americans loved and only Detroit knew how to make.

A great deal has been written about the decline of America's carmakers (not least in this newspaper), but so far there have been few books on the subject, perhaps because until the middle of last year there seemed to be no obvious denouement. The same could be said again now. Thanks to $50 billion in federal loans for GM and $16 billion for Chrysler and the government-supervised “quick rinse” bankruptcies that magically made unsupportable liabilities disappear, both companies emerged from Chapter 11 after little more than 40 days, leaner, fitter and supposedly ready to fight another day.

Nonetheless, for Paul Ingrassia, a retired Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, the dramas of 2009 are more than enough to warrant an account of Detroit's history, from the birth of carmaking in America more than a century ago through its glory years during the long post-war boom to its mounting problems in the 1980s, its brief recovery in the 1990s and its eventual collapse. For Mr Ingrassia, there are no real villains, but lots of people who could and should have done better.

Among them are successive leaders of the United Auto Workers union, who extracted extraordinarily generous wages and benefits for their mainly unskilled members during the fat years when the car companies were throwing off more cash than they knew what to do with. But they then resolutely opposed any changes to pay and conditions long after it was obvious that the old model had been consigned to obsolescence, as surely as tail fins, by the new non-union Asian-brand “transplant” factories springing up in the southern states. One example of Detroit's exceptionalism was the notorious “jobs bank” that paid laid-off workers more than 90% of their salary indefinitely just to sit around and play cards or watch television.

The bosses also get their share of the blame for failing to confront reality and resorting to quick fix “game-changing” strategies, such as GM's launch of its Saturn brand, which were either ditched after a few years or undermined by union intransigence and management cowardice. Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of GM for nearly a decade, on whose watch the company lost at least $85 billion, became the personification of Detroit's tragedy. Intelligent, decent and charming, Mr Wagoner was revered at GM right up to the day in March last year when the head of President Obama's car task-force told him that his time was up. Mr Wagoner placed two disastrous bets during his catastrophic stewardship of GM. The first was that petrol prices would stay low, thus allowing GM to concentrate on building gas-guzzling trucks rather than spend money on developing a competitive range of cars to take on the Japanese. The second was that he could win sufficient concessions from the UAW to restore GM to viability through reasoned negotiation rather than the knock-down, drag-out fight that the urgency of the situation demanded.

Mr Ingrassia tells Detroit's story with economy, vigour and restrained fury. But the book takes on the feel of a long, not especially revelatory, magazine article as the author gets nearer to the most recent events. He is also reluctant to predict what may lie ahead for GM (shorn of brands and debt, but owned by the government), Chrysler (under the management of Italy's Fiat) and Ford (well-managed, valiantly avoiding the stigma of bankruptcy and bail-out, but still groaning under the weight of an only partially restructured balance sheet). That may be wise. Mr Ingrassia's last book, which came out in 1994, was entitled “Comeback: the Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry”.